AFRICAN EYE NEWS SERVICE, Washington | Monday
OUTSPOKEN Wits University professor and social commentator Patrick Bond has criticised President Thabo Mbeki’s economic policies at a seminar in the US, instead lobbying US activists to join a boycott on the World Bank.
Bond told non-government organisations at the Washington Centre for Economic Justice and Policy Research that South Africa did not need World Bank loans because the premise of globalisation, or free flow of trade, finance and direct investment “simply doesn’t work for South Africa or Africa.”
Criticising Mbeki’s attempts to influence the world economy, Bond said Mbeki’s vision for social democracy through global strategies and alliances would fail, not because of the president’s lack of integrity but because “failure is already emanating from the very project itself”.
Bond, who is currently an associate professor at the Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management and former senior economist at the National Institute for Economic Policy, made similar comments at a University of Durban-Westville memorial lecture earlier this month.
He said: “Either Mbeki is lost, bewildered, or simply capable of saying anything pleasing to any audience to curry flavour, like any politician. Or something else is going on.”
Bond said he believed Mbeki and his Pretoria colleagues appeared to be excluding alliances with social, labour and environmental movements who were the main agents of progressive global change.
“Mbeki emerged as an apparently far more aggressive critic of the global status quo, and at first glance his activity represented an impressive, forthrightly progressive attempt to rejig the global economy in the interests of lower income countries, to actualise the “African Renaissance” and more generally to imprint the world with South Africa’s ‘social democratic’ style of rule,” Bond said.
Bond was concerned, however, that Mbeki’s perceived “talk left, act right” rhetoric was confusing and reflected contradictions within his approach.
Bond pointed out that Mbeki often appeared to support globalisation, while simultaneously advancing public critiques of international markets